Social+Bookmarking

= = =**SOCIAL BOOKMARKING**=


 * What is social bookmarking?**

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and tagging them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work, notifying the users when a URL no longer functions. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keywords, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource. Social bookmarking sites indicate who created each bookmark and provides access to that person's other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag.

Browsers usually have a feature which allows you to record a website that you like. But it is a list that is resident on that computer only. Social bookmarking is a way to upload and organize the sites you normally would 'bookmark' so that they are accessible and shareable at any time from any computer. To quote D-Lib magazine: (//http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html//) "Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are **managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web**, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities.

Keeping your bookmarks on a website allows you to access your favorite websites from anywhere. Your bookmarks are available and always backed up no matter which computer you use. Find Stuff Other People LikeAnd even better, you can see what other people have found and share bookmarks with your friends. Bookmarks can be kept private, but most are public and available for everyone to see. See who has the same interests as you!


 * What is Social Bookmarking?**

Most people are familiar with collecting and storing bookmarks in their browsers, known as "Favorites" or "Bookmarks". However, social bookmarking is about collecting and storing bookmarks online and then sharing them with others. An extra aspect of social bookmarking is that the bookmarks can be **tagged**, this means categorizing or describing them by using keywords defined by the user, which means that they then become searchable by others.

**Social bookmarking sites and tools** There are a large number of social bookmarking tools. Which service is best depends on a the functionality, the amount of privacy and security it provides. Some tools provide dedicated social bookmarking, others include other types of collaboration. When you start to look for information online, very often the first place you turn to are the search engines to bring home web pages that will fit what you're looking for.

Search engines, however, are not always the best of even the most efficient way of finding great online content. Anyone that has ever waded through page after page of Google results hoping that they have hit on that elusive keyword can vouch for that.


 * Social bookmarking brings to the the human touch**. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they've found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.
 * Social bookmarking services make this possible**, giving users the opportunity to quickly and easily tag web pages, effectively [|bookmarking] them as they would for themselves, but sharing them through centralized services, and leaving useful annotations and notes for other users to come across. As sites are tagged, over time vast collections of these user generated tags are gathered together, and can then be searched by anyone making use of the social bookmarking services.

As an example, should you wish to find some great content on the subject of online collaboration you could tap this term into a social bookmarking search, and would then be given all of the latest pages tagged under this term by hundreds of thousands of users across the web. You are tapping directly into the web browsing experience of other people, and people more than likely sharing interests with you, rather than relying on a machine to pick out keywords from online fields of text.

Social bookmarking is all about labeling the web, making it easier to find the content that you're looking for by passing on what you've found. The labels applied to web sites are commonly known as **tags**, tags help information to be aggregated and mined for information. media type="file" key="Social Bookmarking in Plain English, for the rest of us [www.keepvid.com].flv" width="360" height="270"

Collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. ge.

Social bookmarking sites and tools > >
 * [|Symbaloo]
 * [|Delicious]
 * [| Diigo]
 * [|BuddyMarks]


 * Further reading **
 * Nine notable uses for social bookmarking, Mark Dykeman, Webupon, November 2007


 * MORE SOCIAL NETWORKS & SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS **
 * More collaboration tools (Social bookmarking tools are shown in the B column)

Find the Best of Web through People, you only find the bookmarks that other people think are worth keeping. Ratings and tags instantly give you an idea of what people think of a bookmark, making your web searches more informed than ever. It's like having a community of assistants help you find what you need, when you need it.

Tags are keywords given to bookmarks that act like labels for making them easy to find later. Instead of making a folder with a name and putting bookmarks into it, you give tags to bookmarks to describe the website they point to. Individual tags are separated by commas, so they can have spaces and special characters. Some tag examples are: food, Romeo & Juliet, best in show.

Each tag someone gives a bookmark is a way to find that bookmark when you need it. Just by searching for a tag or clicking it, you instantly find all bookmarks with that tag in your collection or from all users. Tags allow you to reorganize bookmarks just the way you need them at any time, without even tryin

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 * ASSIGNMENT**
 * 1) Create an account on one of the social bookmarking systems
 * 2) Add several bookmarks to it
 * 3) Post a link to your bookmarks on your blog

More examples of social bookmarking websites! []